


Truest Self

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers
Genre: Body Horror, Family, biblical descriptions of angels, horrors from beyond, s3 e4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Tag's always been a strange one - turns out, that covers a lot more ground than anyone thought.





	Truest Self

Tag had been afraid.

He’d been afraid when Bryn had suggested they go through the portal to the Other side. When he’d known to look for it, the secondary portal had been obvious; an open mouth, drawing both from the Real world around them and the Phase state in front of them, that lead to the whirling place of Unreality he’d last seen when he’d destroyed half-dad’s tether. That place had been bad enough simply seen through the veil of the torn tether; seeing it up close and personal, without that veiling presence, had been both terrifying and…exhilarating?

They had ultimately decided to go through, of course; neither Bryn nor Rex had seemed particularly keen on passing up the opportunity to attack the enemy’s stronghold. Sam had agreed with them, once Tag had looped Puq telepathically into communication with the rest of the team, and Puq had been happy enough to follow Sam’s lead. Tag had kept his worries to himself and done what he had been trained to do since he was very young: Follow his Summoner.

Tag had felt another frission of fear going through the first portal. He was well-used to the phase state, though Bryn’s brilliant Fire never ceased to take his breath away, but - he hadn’t been able to see the rest of their party. For the breathless instant where the world turned the color of the wine-dark sea and vast currents of sea-foam and storm-wave slipped by him as the tides of the world ebbed and flowed, Sam, Puq, and Rex had vanished even from his Phase-sight. He had strained his eyes for the refulgent purple glow, so out of place in this world of ocean-flowing blue, that would at least mark out the Puq - but he had seen nothing, and then the second portal had swallowed them whole.

Stepping into the Other side had been like stepping into a nightmare. It was a horribly alien place; nothing about it was Real, and even while the shapes were functionally familiar they looked wrong. Bad. His feet sank into the floor, though no matter how much sinking occurred it never went up over his shoe. The walls were perpetually melting like some kind of horrible fountain, material oozing along from the top down towards the floor in a never-ending stream that looked like it should have run out of ichor to ooze long ago, but was still going in defiance of all the known laws of physics.

Even the things that were definitely from the Real world had only contributed to the subtle horror of the place. Solid shapes that didn’t melt, in colors other than black, with the most ubiquitous logo in the galaxy stamped on them? Somehow they only managed to highlight the dripping ichor in ways that defied the eye to explain it. The ichor, in its turn, had given the Company technology a decidedly sinister aura that Puq had been the only one brave enough to voice; _if the Company was making the equipment the Others were using to take and take and take from the Real world, maybe the Company was also using the equipment to take and take and take to use for their own purposes?_

And yet the worst part of the Other side had been the way it made him _feel_. Part of him was so comfortable here, possibly even luxuriating in the feeling of the unreality; that part wanted him to dig his toes into the constantly-melting floor like it was a deep shag carpet, stretch out, lean against a wall, _revel_ in the ichor as it ran through and around him. The other part, the part he had clung to desperately ever since his first encounter with his half-dad, rejected the place around him. The walls, floor, ceiling, door - everything was _wrong_ and he didn’t know what to do about it.

The psychic dissonance had left him reeling internally, torn between the strong desire to puke and the equally strong desire to _consume_. He had felt unmoored, in a way he hadn’t since the fight with Variq. His very _soul_ had felt disconnected from his body, almost a step up and to the left - like a poorly-set third-person view of the body known as Tag. His hands, fingers, legs, toes - all of them had felt like they belonged to someone else, like he was a puppetmaster pulling on strings to make this body move. His limbs hadn’t been jerking and twitching from power overload this time, which had made things easier, but there was a certain lack of whatever might be called his usual grace.

The fact that his kick had connected with the Other soldier had surprised Tag almost as much as it had surprised the rest of his party; the fact that the kick was hard enough to send a seven-foot-tall being wearing half-plate-mail out of its native reality and all the way through two portals was…something. Tag wasn’t the most physical of fighters, and though he’d received the same basic hand-to-hand training that the rest of the parallels in the monastery had gotten, he wasn’t Rex levels of asskicking…in the Real world. Here, though, in a place that was at once _awful_ and _awfully familiar_ , he had felt the Other side of him - the part he’d so resolutely tried to deny and ignore - getting stronger by the moment.

The alarm that had blared when they reversed the streams on the capacitors had _hurt_. The others had all heard the howls of the damned coming through the speaking-trumpets mounted high on the walls above them, but as the distance between himself and his physical form had increased Tag had heard the other parts to it as well, a sour, metallic taste in his mouth and the feeling of a thousand tiny insects crawling up and down his spine as the noise echoed in dimensions humans were simply incapable of accessing. Underneath that, he had heard the sound of movement headed their way.

He had been so _afraid_. He had been so terrified - what would happen if he _let go_? What would happen if he stepped forth? But one fear, overriding them all, had tipped his hand: 

_What would happen to his family-of-choice if he didn’t?_

So he had stepped forward.

Stepping out of his body was a _relief_ , the likes of which he’d never known before. Tag hadn’t realized until now just exactly how _far_ he had needed to compress to fit in such a tiny mortal shell. Even as the representation of his intent formed itself out of the ichor, he _unfolded_ along planes and dimensions that human minds were not built to comprehend. Wings vast enough to encompass whole planets stretched along the eleventh dimension, uncountable eyes blinking from among the feathers. Dog heads with jaws that opened down to their chest stretched and yawned in the seventh, eighth, and ninth dimensions. Limbs of uncountable numbers, unfathomable sizes, and incomprehensible shapes stretched out from where he’d folded and tucked them away inside his human shell along dimensions innumerable.

As his simplest form stretched into three dimensions, he could see the Others freeze before him. They were as ants before a mountain - it wasn’t the crown on his form’s brow that arrested them, that was merely a symbol of the power and majesty of his full existence; it was the _vastness_ of all that he was, in all the planes they existed in. Compared to him, they were insignificantly tiny and they knew it, their own shapes - smaller and less complex than his - curling into themselves as they awaited his orders. He looked over them, and dismissed them as the insignificant beings they were.

After all, he was not afraid.

And why _should_ he be afraid? This was _his_ place, and his people; his powers here were unlimited. This was the place he _belonged_ ; no more doubt, no more fear, no more wondering what he had done wrong. In this place, there were only absolutes. And the very most basic absolute was… _him_.

“Tag. Tag!”

A prodding in a lower dimension shook him from his contemplation. It took him several moments to focus in on the very limited line of communication one of the Real people was trying to open up to his psyche. It took him several moments longer to marshal his cognition to the point where responding wouldn’t simply overwhelm the mind of the person he was talking to.

“Dark figure with a lot of power! I don’t know what to call you.”

Several of his mouths curled up into smiles that would drive a human mad to even glimpse them; Bryn was as eloquent as always, and her attempts to give him a different name sent a curl of warmth shivering through his feathers.

“Tag will be fine.”

Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan had chosen a very long name to represent themselves to the Real people; Tag suspected the Other had gotten it from a human who had no more need of it when they had taken the Company machines from the Real world. It was the kind of utterly wrong-headed thing they’d do.

“He doesn’t look fine! He’s frozen! What the fuck are you doing with my friend?”

Ah, she hadn’t made the connection yet. He supposed that the iron-clad figure that was visible to her and the others looked nothing like his human shell - and all of himself that was contained in higher dimensions even less so. She sounded rather upset at the thought that Tag might have been harmed, which gave him a warm feeling that pushed away some of the empty hunger at his core - and the idea that he had been the one to do the harming was somewhat amusing.

“I am your friend.”

The statement was very simple, but he spoke it on all the planes he had a mouth to say it with. She could only hear it on the ones she had access to, of course, but such a statement said in such a fashion in this place was more binding than iron chains; he could feel the hunger that plagued him and all his kin abate somewhat more, buttressed by that fact.

“ _You_ are my friend? What’s my favorite color?”

“Magenta.”

The response slipped out before he could really think about it; it was the color that poured off of her in the fifth plane where Fire met Time. He could see it so clearly; true magenta, not the poor imitation his human eyes had seen when they tried to fill in a gap in the visible light spectrum. True magenta was a much more powerful color, filled with the vibrancy of life and the urgency of fire.

Yes, he’d always associate her with magenta now.

“Wrong.”

She sounded so offended and he sighed a great gust of wind into the fifteenth dimension.

“Bryn, you and I both know that we have not had the favorite color conversation. We’ve had the favorite t-shirt conversation, which is that one you picked up at that punk rock show when you turned fourteen. It was the first time you’d left home by yourself, and you felt like a badass.”

She was silent for several long moments, but Tag was content to wait. Time did not truly pass here, not in the same way it passed in the Real world; they had all the time they needed.

“What’s our band name?”

The question was flat, caught somewhere between suspicion and hope, and he smiled again.

“Snakes on a brain stem.”

“Okay, _phew_. What are you doing? Why do you sound all weird? What’s going on on this planet?”

Her tone changed from relief to one of confusion in the span of a few seconds, and Tag decided that these were questions better answered for everyone.

It was simple enough to loop the others into the telepathic conference; their minds could not resist his will, though in this case he was merely establishing clear lines of communication. The spriggan’s reaction was the most interesting; it appeared Puq could see a few more dimensions that the normal humans, and there was something about his face that suggested that if he _were_ human, the whites would be showing all the way around his eyes.

“Bryn. Puq. Sam - hello in there. Rex, welcome.”

Tag turned his attention briefly to the Others before him; in the limited visible dimensions they stood motionless, but in the higher dimensions they crouched and twisted under the force of his gaze.

“Stand down. I have this under control.”

Energies dissipated and lower-order weapons were set down from ready positions. He could see their confusion in every ripple and twist of their forms, their own wings - much smaller than his - and limited numbers of eyes and mouths moving between him and the four Real people who stood in this place.

Still, their confusion was not his concern. He returned his attention to his friends, who all stared at him in varying stages of confusion and dismay.

“You think that things happen one after the other, that we siphon energy from planets, that we take over galaxies, that we crush them and move on. The reality is that is has all already happened, it will all happen, it is all happening now. The allegiances that you think you have, your plans, your course of action, are just strands of thread moving underwater. What we’re doing here is the plan, inasmuch as the plan is merely what is happening.”

Explaining the nonlinear nature of time to creatures stuck in three dimensions was frustrating. Their language did not quite have the words or tenses to make true sense of the concepts he was trying to get across. Blinkered and fettered by their own mortal nature, they could not comprehend that the beginning of time and the end of it were the selfsame spot, and that everything in between did not always happen in order.

Turning, he addressed the Others in the room.

“Now, you can attempt to stop us,” the word he used encompassed himself and the four Real people; their lives were short and when the plan did not depend on Time to happen, it would be easy enough to continue after they had gone. “And I will have no moral qualms about snuffing your lives out. Or you can run back to the castle and tell you-know-who that we’re here.” Asahel did not have a castle, per se, but it was the closest analogue Tag could use for the benefit of the four people in the room who did not have the lexicon he did.

The second largest Other in the room - one of those who had supped, just a little, on the elemental magics of the Real world they had been supposed to use against intruders - sent the lesser Others flying away at great speeds, while themselves remaining near the door. Tag watched them go, switching to eyes on other planes when they moved beyond range of mortal vision. When Asahel came, he would see the Other long before they entered mortal visual range.

In said mortal visual range, however, there was a great deal going on. Bryn appeared to be inspecting the room while the spriggan heaved a machine over his head and Rex tackled Tag’s mortal shell. A simple brush over her mind and that physical shell was enough to verify that she hadn’t damaged it significantly, and Tag couldn’t help murmuring in relief. For all it was damned uncomfortable to fit himself into, he didn’t wish to leave it behind entirely just yet.

Looming figures visible in the fifth dimension and beyond drew his attention. One towered above the others, whirling concentric rings concealing the heads of animals and more mouths than he’d seen on any Other; the form was unmistakably Asahel. The Other was not quite so large as Tag himself, of course, but still several orders of magnitude beyond the retinue that accompanied them. Tag stretched again, luxuriating in the feel of having space enough to move - and, of course, appearing just that _little_ bit bigger.

Naturally, it was at that point Rex started shaking his human body like a terrier with a particularly dense rat. Tag turned his attention to her and spoke on the mortal plane.

“Rex, it cannot respond. It’s not necessary; I’m right here, whatever you have to say, I’m listening.”

Rex kept shaking. “It’s like a magic 8-ball, right? I’m looking for answers here, buddy.”

Tag felt a trace of exasperation creep into him. “Rex, it is not a magic 8-ball - yes, I know what that is. Please stop shaking it, I would like to return to that form at some point.” Though she could neither see nor feel them, he still flapped some of his wings along the seventeenth dimension in agitation. “It has a certain, naïve, _je na sais quoi_ that tickles.”

It was at that moment that Asahel chose to make their appearance into the room where those with limited perception could finally see them, and Rex stopped shaking Tag’s human form _finally_. The lesser Others fanned out as the two titans contemplated each other for a long moment.

Tag’s mind raced as he looked at the forces arrayed before them. He could take the guards out relatively easily if he had to, but not if he had to hold off Asahel at the same time. And, while he trusted his friends with a number of things, six to one were pretty long odds even for Rex; he had to buy time for his friends to make it back through the portal, or they’d all die here and the thought of that happening was… _unpleasant_.

“Interesting,” Asahel said, the first to break the silence. Eyes blinked along their body, and a googolplex of wings unfurled in an artfully casual fashion as they, too, took the opportunity to ‘stretch.’ Tag was unimpressed; their wingspan was less than two-thirds of his own.

“While I’m sure we have a lot to talk about, let’s tidy up the loose ends first.” Reaching out with an arm and his will. Tag lifted the last remaining piece of Company tech and crushed it slowly and carefully in front of the Other. None of them moved physically, but several shifted into better positions to flee from on the sixth plane. He released it, and let it drop to the approximated floor with a dull thud before meeting all of Asahel’s eyes.

“I’d always been curious about the scar running down my body. It had been there for as long as I could remember; now, I finally see it for what it is. It’s just a zipper, allowing me to take off this clumsy, limiting, if not overly-sincere shell. He has his uses, and I intend to keep him intact, but - gosh. It’s fun to _flex_.” So saying, he ‘stretched’ too - and by far more impressively than Asahel had. The physical body that was there for the humans’ benefit did not move, but in the dimensions beyond wings stretched, mouths gaped, eyes squeezed shut, and limbs reached across the infinite nothing around them. The lesser Others shrank even further, and Asahel tucked their wings away almost sulkily.

“Eh. I…know the feeling. I’m curious, though, as to why you’re here, Tag. And why you… _summoned_ me.” There was the faintest tinge of uncertainty in Asahel’s voice, and Tag smiled blandly with mouths big enough to swallow whales whole.

Time to begin his gambit. “Well, there’s really no reason to beat around the bush; I’m not trying to sneak out of my room past curfew. I’m here as a direct challenge.” Asahel ceased movement on every dimension, all of their attention riveted on Tag as he continued. “We have the option, it seems, to continue doing what we’re doing; you’ll open rifts, we’ll close them. Every so often, as an interlude, we’ll come face to face and inevitably one will run off without getting anything satisfactory from the other. So I thought, why not skip that?”

Tag stopped and leaned back, and Asahel remained stock still for a moment before nodding slowly.

“Interesting.”

They made a gesture, and the guards lowered their mortal weapons and stepped back from the two titans. Another gesture, and a rack of weapons formed up between the two combatants on the physical plane. On the planes above, wings once more unfurled - this time revealing steel feathers and obsidian-tipped claws. Tag could hear Rex hyperventilating a little behind him, but he only had eyes for his opponent - who, in turn, was sizing him up.

“I’d be interested to know your proposed reward,” Asahel said, apropos of nothing, and Tag paused for a long moment. There was only one thing he could ask for without raising suspicions that he was merely buying time, but it was also the one thing he’d been denying since the first time his human form had laid eyes on Asahel.

“My birthright,” he said clearly, and Asahel was once again frozen in surprise. “You have your way of doing things, and when I take the throne I’ll have mine. Whether our objectives are the same or not, I think you’ve gotten _sloppy_. Please,” he gestured broadly to the newly-manifested weapons rack, “take first pick of the weapons.”

It took Asahel a moment to move, but when they did their form picked up a vary familiar glaive. Turning towards Tag, Asahel pointed the glaive directly at where Tag’s heart would be if he were human.

“I can agree to your terms. Mine are; should I win this duel, you _will_ enact your destiny as we have foreseen. There will be no more _arguments_ , no more _perceived debt_ to lower order creatures,” Here Asahel’s eyes moved to Tag’s compatriots, and Tag instinctively mantled with six dozen of his largest wings. Something like triumph gleamed in Asahel’s eyes as they continued. “There will be no more _fussing_ and _fighting_. You _will_ take up your correct position, and do what we put you on that side of the Rift to do.”

Tag responded in the only way he could. “Without a second thought.”

Asahel’s ninth-dimensional rings rotated as their physical form gestured to the weapons rack. “Choose your weapon.”

Before Tag’s physical form could approach the weapons rack, Rex strode forward and claimed one of the weapons - an enormous double-bladed harvest scythe, with one blade at each end of the crooked pole. Tag and Asahel watched her move in silence, before Asahel addressed Tag again.

“If you add combatants to your side, I will match them stroke for stroke. Is that agreeable?”

Tag shrugged, the movement accentuated by the floor-length cape his physical form was wearing. “You do whatever you need to do; I will be fighting _alone_ in this,” he said, stressing the word alone so that his friends would know to let him deal. If they moved in, it would only give Asahel license to attack them in ways they couldn’t even see - and he very much doubted their ability to survive that.

Puq piped up unexpectedly. “Hey Tag, if, uh, you get to pick weapons, I suggest compliments!” The spriggan’s tone was as up-beat and cheerful as ever, and totally at odds with the large piece of machinery he still held threateningly over his head.

Tag smiled just a bit, grateful for the reminder of why he counted these people among his friends. “Thank you, Puq.” Even as he spoke he, too, flexed his form in the dimensions beyond the physical. Claws extended, feathers hardened, teeth gnashed, and eyelids contracted to protective slits.

Asahel merely shook their head and gestured to the rack of weaponry. “Standard rules will apply; you can use any of the powers that you have in this place, as I will. You may choose any weapon you wish - if it is not on the rack now, it can be manifested upon request. No ranged weaponry allowed.”

Something in Tag bristled a little at Asahel’s tone, and several of his sixth-dimensional mouths snarled. “Of course. You can’t help but to condescend a little, even now as you face your own death. You don’t need to manifest anything for me; this is my _home_.” He gestured contemptuously and the weapons rack dissolved back into the ichor from whence it had come. He didn’t need that kind of weaponry - not here, not now. He knew more tricks about fitting into simple three-dimensional space than Asahel could ever dream of, and he used them to his fullest advantage. The same tricks that let him fit the entirety of his multi-dimensional form into a three-dimensional human also let him fit some of the more _exotic_ parts of himself onto the material plane.

The ichor of the floor rose up and joined with his cape to surround him in a cocoon; the shifting of mass and shape along dimensions humans didn’t have words for was bad for their fragile psyches and he’d rather have four fully-functional teammates at his back than three gibbering, crying, messes and Puq. He shuffled the most useful, least disturbing features he could into the mortal plane - as handy as a mouth that hinged at his midsection would be, that seemed a bit too much. A tail for balance, clawed paws for weapons, mountains for armor, and horns for intimidation.

Asahel paused for a moment, taking in the new configurations Tag had forced on the first three dimensions and all the ones after them, and nodded. “Right,” they said forcefully, and a surge of will heralded the reappearance of the weapons rack. They stowed the glaive carefully before reaching down and grabbing a bastard sword and a heavy tower shield. Tapping the sword against the shield experimentally, they nod to Tag. “Fair.”

Tag didn’t wait, immediately rushing forward to attack. Claw connected with shield in a resounding clang, and in the planes beyond wings met rings. Whatever Asahel had been expecting, it wasn’t such an immediate response and the Other went sailing through space and dimensions only to fetch up hard against a wall. The wall itself began to bleed in response, but Tag couldn’t smell any tearing damage to the other’s form and huffed in disappointment.

Still, he had bought himself time and that was all he really needed. Pushing his physical form up onto two legs, he reached first for the last piece of undamaged machinery in the room with his paw and his will. With a screeching complaint, the brightly-glowing keystone tore itself out of the arch and flew into his waiting paw. Without pause, he turned and faced Asahel, who was leaning on their shield and trying to regain their balance.

Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan was no more a father of his than Rex was his mother for having made him an energy weapon. Asahel’s help had been invaluable for constructing his mortal shell, but they were more akin to siblings than father and son. So, too, did their crowns share a purpose; a physical manifestation of powers beyond mortal ken.

So Tag reached out and _took_ it.

In the physical realm, he simply reached out with his hand and bent his will upon Asahel’s crown. In the dimensions beyond, he reached across the gulf between them and began tearing Asahel’s wings away, snapping at the very substance that comprised all that the Other was - their source of power. Asahel resisted, trying desperately to fight a battle on two fronts - and losing both. As the crown came away from their head with an awful snapping _crunch_ , their wings shredded underneath Tag’s onslaught. Wings on the ninth, sixth, seventeenth, eleventh, twenty-third, and more dimensions fell apart under his claws - as did a number of rings and eyes - and into a thousand of Tag’s gaping mouths.

When Tag finally withdrew as the crown fell into his heavy claws, Asahel’s size had been reduced by almost a full third and ichor dripped in directions humans couldn’t name. Tag himself had gained noticeably in size, and his form rippled as he found a new stable configuration. Throwing his head - heads - back, he _**roared**_ his triumph across the Other plane of existence. Mouths on every dimension howled, and the walls around them _shattered_ under the onslaught.

A strange tug at his heel had him whipping around, and he saw Bryn looking at him with desperate eyes - and the portal beginning to fritz out behind her.

An enormous crash to his left distracted him for just a moment - apparently Puq had taken exception to some of the guards and had dropped the generator on them? - but that moment was enough. Rex flung his human form through the fritzing portal and, like a fish on a line, Tag was pulled from his home and flung once more into the heavily limited, three-dimensional form of Tag the Parallel. It was a shock, and Tag did the only appropriate thing he could do in that moment.

Tag passed the _fuck_ out.


End file.
